Flashback Friday: HomeGrocer.com attacks online groceries

In celebration of the seventh anniversary of the peak of the Nasdaq, I am looking back at some of the business ideas from that era.

Photo: Phil Webber

Perhaps no company was more synonymous with the dot-com boom in the Seattle area than HomeGrocer.com. With immaculate peach-colored trucks and a charismatic co-founder in Terry Drayton, HomeGrocer.com had a public face unlike most Internet startups. (I know a few people who still have HomeGrocer.com magnets on their refrigerators).

The Bellevue startup attracted a lot of attention for its idea of delivering groceries directly to consumers’ door steps. But it also consumed massive amounts of cash before selling out in a doomed merger with Webvan.

I first started covering the company as a young reporter for the Eastside Journal, continuing that coverage when I moved to the Seattle P-I in 1999. By the summer of 2001, HomeGrocer.com and Webvan had collapsed in a spectacular burnout. And I had spilled a lot of ink on the topic.